Jacqueline Cerquiglini poses an intriguing indirect question: ‘l’on peut, à bon droit, se demander quels sont les harmoniques du Voir Dit’.The statement alludes, of course, to the musical context of Machaut’s invention, essential according to Toute Belle if one wants to enjoy Guillaume’s poetry fully. But it also recalls a tradition in which the poet adopts an art of love while playing with modulations on the rhetorical tradition of rewriting. This is evident in Toute Belle’s apprenticeship during which she imitates and even challenges Guillaume’s lyrics. Moreover, in the social milieu of late medieval French literature such give and take is not only part of apprenticeship. It belongs as well to the social milieu in which poets write. They write to one another, conversing, debating, and challenging. Guillaume’s exchange with Thomas Paien, later joined by Froissart and Chaucer, is typical of this sort of activity. The Voir Dit and, indeed, most of what we call courtly literature is, citing Cerquiglini again, ‘une forme polémique’in an epoch in which it becomes difficult to identify truth and even dangerous to express it.Her reference to the ‘harmoniques du Voir Dit’ fuses musical terminology and the rhetorical mode;it also suggests the elements of an aesthetic experience that locates Machaut’s musical and poetic compositions in a harmonious universe wherein all is disposed according to measure, number, and weight (Biblia, Sapientia 11:21).

The Medieval Experience of Beauty

Very early on in their relationship Toute Belle justifies her and her contemporaries’ esteem for Machaut’s/Guillaume’s poetry. This is, as Letter 5 puts it, because of the aesthetic pleasure that his poetry gives her. Your ‘chansons’, she exclaims, ‘en l’ame de moi … sont toutes si bonnes, et me plaisent tant, et aussi tout quanque vous m’escrivez, car je ne preng confort ni esbatement fors en veoir et es lire; et preng si grant plaisance que je en laisse souvent autres besongnes’ (VD, p. 138a/86) [songs feel so good deep down inside me and please me so much, as does everything you write to me, for I derive no comfort or pleasure except in seeing and reading them. Indeed, I take such great pleasure that I often leave other tasks undone].